5 Seemingly Harmless Groups That Wield Terrifying Power

5 The Auto Clubs That Invented Jaywalking to Shift Blame to Pedestrians

Sure, we all hate it when some arrogant pedestrian has the audacity to get their blood all over our hood, but put yourself in the shoes of that oblivious walk-monkey for a second: Isn't it a little strange that, if you happen to cross the road at the wrong spot, you're the lawbreaker, even if you don't inconvenience any drivers at all? Motorcycles, bicycles -- hell, even horses supposedly have equal rights to the road. But you, with your primitive feet, have absolutely no business being there, and you're basically volunteering for a real-life game of Frogger every time you cross the street in a non-stripy section.

But that wasn't always the case. When cars first arrived on the scene, they weren't guaranteed the right of way -- if a car hit a pedestrian, it was a shocking and public tragedy. The driver would face charges of something like "technical manslaughter" even when the accident was considered unavoidable. The thinking was that you're the one shooting about in a murder machine -- the burden of caution is on you.

It was auto clubs like AAA that first worked to make drivers the lords of the blacktop. Back in 1923, people started calling for physical speed limiters on cars to prevent accidents, and auto clubs (under heavy influence from the boys in Detroit) realized that slower cars would result in fewer owners, fewer sales, and fewer memberships. With an astoundingly subtle, graceful, not even slightly racist campaign, they lobbied and successfully kept American cars faster than your mom at a Loverboy concert.

The bigger victory, though, was shifting the blame for accidents away from errant, roguish, begoggled old-timey automobilists over to those devil-may-care pedestrians. The concept of jaywalking basically didn't exist until the 1920s -- why would it? Streets were made for people to get around, and most people got around by walking. Now they suddenly had to get the hell out of the road to make way for cars. It makes sense to us today in our auto-centric culture, but picture that moment when it happened: It would be like waking up one morning to find that you could no longer walk down the hallway in your apartment building because too many people were getting hit by Segways.

So with the legislation in place, it came time to focus on changing people's perceptions. And much like cigarettes and Japanese card-battle games, auto makers found that they had to hit them young. AAA paid for the safety education of millions of students, telling children to use crosswalks and look both ways. Who could argue with that? It was all in the name of saving those precious young sales.

Lives. We mean saving lives. Same difference, right?

4 Credit Reporting Agencies Who Sell You to the Highest Bidder (Or Any Bidder)

As far as society is concerned, your entire worth as a human being boils down to a single number on a single piece of paper: your credit score. Somehow, we all accidentally entered into a Logan's Run-type situation, but instead of coming when we turn 30, the men in black jumpsuits show up when we inevitably overcharge our Home Depot card trying to build a trebuchet in our living room.

And that's not the unsettling part. See, credit ratings are controlled by just three private companies: Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion. But these companies rule far more than your credit score. Recently, Experian landed a sweet deal with the Social Security Administration under which they control your access to online Social Security statements and benefits. That's particularly scary because it turns out that Experian isn't exactly great at online security: Last year, Irish regulators opened an investigation into their security practices due to the more than 80 breaches of their consumer database since 2006. If you're wondering why the Irish were investigating the issue, it's because Experian -- the company that controls access to U.S. Social Security benefits and the credit reports of U.S. consumers -- is based in Dublin. Ireland's not exactly Thunderdome or anything -- we're sure they have a fine workforce -- but we're outsourcing our own benefits and the maintenance of the single most important number in our lives?

Don't freak out.

Yet.

Because it keeps going!

You know all those pre-approved credit offers that you get in the mail and use as kindling for your flaming trebuchet balls of justice? Those companies know to send you all that crap because the credit reporting agencies can sell your information to any third party they damn well please. And they're not just selling your name, address, and credit score -- they even sell unlisted phone numbers. Presumably because they, like Cracked, know that everything is better in lists.

3 The Medical-Industrial Complex That Exists Solely to Bankrupt You

We all know that the health care industry has the second most jacked up perception of value in the country, slightly behind defense contractors and just above printer ink. But you might not know exactly how bad it really is, so here -- check out this comparison of the cost of medical procedures in the U.S. versus the rest of the world:

An angiogram in the U.S. costs 26 times what it does in Canada. Canada is right there! Depending on where you live in the States, you could conceivably look out your window at the Canadian border and literally watch $879 burst into flames. But why? It's not (solely) because of socialization, or the lack thereof -- it's because the hospitals and insurance companies are involved in a sort of cold war of blatant fraud that leads to constantly escalating prices. Each hospital has a "chargemaster" -- a list of what it charges for every item or service. No two hospitals' chargemasters are quite the same, but they all have one thing in common: gigantic markups. But the insurance companies know it's a hot steaming wad of crap, so they use their largess to haggle with the hospitals and get upwards of 70 percent discounts off the list prices. Hospitals then have to mark everything up, because they know those bastard insurance companies are only going to pay 30 percent of the asking price. You see where this is going: Those without the necessary influence to haggle (i.e., you, the uninsured jerkwad with third-degree trebuchet burns) are pretty well screwed.

People don't think to question it because most of them have never even heard of a chargemaster, and the health industry has managed to steer the health care debate away from asking why we're paying $77 for a single gauze pad when we could buy a whole goddamn box of the things at Walmart for 10 bucks and focusing instead on who should pay for it.

But how have they managed to so completely foul up something as fundamental as health care? The answer is obvious: money. Hospitals are a for-profit industry, and one does have to spend money to make money. Lobbyists for defense, aerospace, oil, and gas have tossed a combined $2.8 billion at Washington since 1998. The medical-industrial complex has spent about twice that.

Five and a half billion dollars buys you a whole lot of influence; we'd recommend holding off on laying siege to your dickhead neighbor Chad's rec room until this whole thing settles down.

2 The Ice Lobby That Caused a 60-Year Setback in Air Conditioning Technology

The man who first thought up the concept of an air conditioner was a doctor by the name of John Gorrie, who felt that keeping his patients cool would likely help them recover. Or at the very least, it would remove one unpleasant descriptor from the term "dying, diseased, and sweaty." At first, Gorrie just used ice to cool his patients' rooms, but he eventually patented something more akin to a combination refrigerator/air conditioning unit in 1851.

But you'll notice we said "first thought up the concept" -- not "invented." It wasn't until 1913 that Fred W. Wolf Jr. perfected the first truly viable unit for the consumer market.

So why the 60-year gap? Because there were some very powerful businessmen in Gorrie's time who made a whole lot of money selling ice. Yes, ice vendors were not always relegated to the moldy machine outside of a Safeway. Back in the day, Big Ice was a powerful entity, and the presumably mustachioed and monocled gentlemen who ran it built their vast fortunes by chopping ice out of frozen bodies of water and shipping it across the country so that people could shove it in their Flintstonian iceboxes. Big Ice wielded so much influence and lobbied so hard against Gorrie that they prevented him from getting his funding by making something as fundamental as "a machine that cools your house and/or food" seem frivolous and irrelevant. Gorrie died penniless at the ripe old age of 52 -- just four short years after filing his patent.

Now, we're not saying Big Ice had him whacked or anything, but think of the potential puns -- "put him on ice," "tell him to chill out," "cool his jets" -- how could they resist?

1 The Butter Barons Who Ruled America's Arteries With an Iron Fist

Nothing can replace butter. Many have tried for that salty, lardy throne ... and many now lay broken, beaten, bested, and basted at butter's feet.

Margarine was the first to try. It came along way back in the 1800s, when Napoleon III offered a prize to whoever could make an artificial version of butter -- something France could mass produce for the army and the poor. While margarine, the pretender, can never replace the taste or texture of normal butter, it does have its benefits. It's better for you than butter. It's cheaper than butter. When you pull it out of the fridge, it doesn't take the form of an unyielding brick that shreds your toast into bready confetti. So why did it take so long to catch on in America?

Three words: the butter barons.

We know, they sound like one of those crappy supervillain teams from an old episode of Super Friends, but we're not making that up. There really were sinister butter-themed villains with a vise grip on America's arteries. See, butter producers knew that margarine could sink them -- at least among the poor of pocket and palate -- so they went straight to Congress, screeching that margarine deprives us of "life promoting vitamins ... without which human infants cannot continue to live." Obviously, that's ridiculous -- nobody is dying in Somalia from a lack of vitamin butter. But sure enough, the Margarine Act of 1886 came along, taxing margarine and forcing producers to pay for expensive licenses.

But that wasn't good enough for the barons. Butter's biggest advantage over margarine is apparently its healthy(?) yellow hue, while pure margarine is a sickly, unappealing white. So the barons got states to ban colored margarine, calling it a clear attempt at fraud. All this, despite the fact that they had already made it a crime to pass margarine off as butter. That's right: Margarine smugglers (and we just want to pause here and reinforce the fact that butter-like spread had a criminal underworld at some point), if caught, would end up in federal prison for crimes against butter.

Even crazier? Laws preventing substituting margarine for butter were still on the books as late as 2011. But those were rare holdouts (Wisconsin, obviously): Butter's brutal rule finally halted during World War II, when dairy shortages temporarily left margarine as the only option. Once the war was over, people realized, "Hey, it may not melt over popcorn so good, but this margarine stuff didn't actually kill any of my children -- maybe it ain't so bad!" The newly successful margarineers (what? The butter barons got cool nicknames) suddenly had the money to advertise their health and cost benefits, and the black market for toast spreads, tragically, collapsed.

And now "margarine smugglers" is nothing more than a pretty sweet name for a band.

Read more from Yosomono on Gaijinass.com and find out how he's planning to take over Japan. Menezes is a writer and layout editor here at Cracked. Follow him on Twitter.

Related Reading: Welcome to the shocking world of real conspiracies, there are plenty more where those came from. We recommend reading up on the Business Plot- the attempted fascist takeover of the United States during World War 2. Ever read a report by the Center for Consumer Freedom? Well it turns out they're just paid shills for the junk food industry. Need more conspiracies? Click this link and strap on your tinfoil hat.